The 10 best British political posters | Art and design | The Guardian The 10 best British political posters With the general election officially under way, we celebrate the finest pre-election propaganda Sam Delaney’s Mad Men & Bad Men: What Happened When British Politics Met Advertising is published by Faber (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99 Friday 3 April 2015 07.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 09.55 EDT You Know Labour Government Works 1966 Pinterest Strategically, this is an absolute car crash of a poster. It neither makes any promises nor stirs up any fear of the opponents. But the bold, quirky design was something else. Labour leader Harold Wilson had set about revolutionising the party’s communications with the appointment of his “Three Wise Men” – Denis Lyons, Peter Lovell-Davis and ad man David Kingsley. They brought a bit of panache to the tatty, flat-cap image. Two decades later, when Peter Mandelson was appointed the party’s communications chief, he plundered the Three Wise Men archive for inspiration: “I loved it,” he said.

“It became the basis of the changes I eventually made to the party image.” Labour Isn’t Working Pinterest Photograph: Saatchi & Saatchi Margaret Thatcher initially rejected this famous poster, telling Saatchi & Saatchi chairman Tim Bell: “You know perfectly well that you should never have the other side’s name in your own poster!” Bell politely explained that it was a double entendre. “Well, it can’t be very good because I don’t get it!” snorted Thatcher. Labour’s Denis Healey called it a “fraud” when he learned that the people in the dole queue were in fact members of Hendon Young Conservatives. The controversy ran for weeks – Bell estimated that the furore earned the equivalent of £5m in free publicity. It was the start of a long and largely fruitful marriage between the Tories and the Saatchis, helping the party win the next four elections and the agency grow into a global behemoth. The Real Fight Is for Britain 1979 Pinterest Political advertising, much like political cartoons, has a tendency to veer off into incomprehensible visual analogies. Complex issues are shoehorned into posters, leaving voters neither convinced nor repelled, just a bit confused.

The Lib Dems have always struggled to produce great ads, due largely to budget limitations. I stumbled across this effort while researching my recent book about British politics and advertising and I was utterly fascinated. What is it trying to say? And why is David Steel looking so scarily enigmatic? It’s impossible to tell. But there is something so brilliantly strange about this poster that I think it warrants a place in the hall of fame. If You Want Me Out, You Should Have the Right to Vote Me Out 1984 Pinterest Photograph: The Advertising Archives John Webster was the ad man who, among other things, invented the Smash Martians, the Sugar Puffs Honey Monster and George the Hofmeister Bear. Ken Livingstone hired him and his agency BMP to create a campaign to fight the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1984. It didn’t save Livingstone but it did turn a local issue into a national talking point. It also shifted perceptions of advertising, showing that it could be a force for social change. BMP went on to become the Labour party’s main agency for over a decade.

Labour’s Policy On Arms 1987 Pinterest Photograph: The Conservative Party Archive/Getty Images By 1987, Tim Bell had left Saatchi & Saatchi but still had the prime minister’s ear. The Tory campaign machine spiralled into chaos as chairman Norman Tebbit worked with Saatchi & Saatchi at Central Office while Thatcher and her consigliere David Young consulted with Bell (now with new agency Lowe Howard-Spink & Bell) at Number 10. Tebbit and Young would eventually engage in a shoving match in Downing Street over whose posters should run. The best of the lot was this Saatchi effort. Neil Kinnock had slipped up in a television interview by suggesting that, in the event of a Soviet invasion, he would encourage Brits to wage resistance through guerrilla warfare. It was an open goal for the agency creatives. Labour’s Tax Bombshell Pinterest Photograph: The Conservative Party Archive/Getty Images “It’s kill or get killed in this game,” Jeremy Sinclair, the Saatchi & Saatchi creative director, told Tory campaign chief Shaun Woodward in 1992. Woodward explained that new PM John Major didn’t want to run a negative campaign.

“That’s fine, if you don’t mind losing,” Sinclair retorted. Tory wonks calculated the spending pledges in Labour’s manifesto as costing £35bn. Sinclair “basically divided it by the number of taxpayers in Britain”. The mathematics might not have been the most rigorous but it allowed the Saatchi team to produce the most notable poster of the campaign, which would define the entire agenda leading up to polling day. Bliar Pinterest Photograph: Reuters Labour’s ad men had always felt one step behind their brutal and relentless counterparts at Saatchis. But Blair recruited Trevor Beattie, the creative master behind the Wonderbra “Hello Boys” poster and French Connection’s FCUK campaign, and soon Labour were beating the Tories at their own game. “This will be the most iconic image of this election,” Beattie told Tony Blair as he unveiled the poster depicting Tory leader William Hague with Thatcher’s hair at No 10. Blair was concerned that it was too flippant. But then he started to laugh. “You’ve just shown why it works,” Labour’s communications chief Alastair Campbell told him. “Because if it’s funny, it’s fine.

People look at it and smile but it makes a really powerful negative point.” The Day Tory Sums Add Up 2005 Pinterest Photograph: The Advertising Archives “We were skint and so we decided to announce a stunt where we got members to come up with poster ideas,” says Alastair Campbell. “This was the winner so we just stuck it on the side of a truck and called a press conference.” But the stunt backfired. A Conservative blogger suggested that the poster was antisemitic (both Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin, featured on the poster, are Jews). The press assumed that Beattie had created the poster and camped out on his doorstep. Worried, he emailed Campbell for advice. “Tell them to fuck off and cover something important,” replied Campbell. Vote Conservative Pinterest Photograph: Conservative Party/PA “Posters will always be important because if you can’t get your message across in five or six words then, chances are, your message isn’t right in the first place,” says Jeremy Sinclair. This time around, the Saatchi team managed to do it in no words at all. This is the best poster of the campaign so far – expressing a clear and powerful message in a single, compelling image.

Whether the fear of an SNP/Labour coalition is really the high-salience issue that the best ads usually focus on is questionable. But we’ve got to assume that the Saatchis have done their research. BBC News | UK | 'Epoch-making' poster was clever fake Friday, 16 March, 2001, 12:19 GMT 'Epoch-making' poster was clever fake Birth of an era The poster reckoned to have changed political advertising was an artful fake - and almost failed to make it to the billboards. The man responsible for it tells BBC News Online's Chris Horrie the story. It was an unusual and unlikely way to make political history. There was no feeling that we were making history. In a way it was a pretty routine job. A question of we've got to whistle something up quickly. Poster's designer Martyn Walsh In the summer of 1978, members of Hendon Young Conservatives answered an emergency call to turn up at a municipal park near the Welsh Harp reservoir in suburban north London. Volunteers were told help was needed for a top secret aspect of the Tory plan to win the general election which, everyone thought, would take place in the autumn of that year.

Problem Little more was said, beyond the fact that the volunteers would be needed for a few minutes, that they should bring their parents along and that they would be photographed standing in a line. The plan was to photograph a "queue" of about 100 people stretching off into the distance. The picture would then be used in graphic form to suggest unemployment would get worse if voters stuck with Jim Callaghan's ailing Labour government. Sceptical: Charles Saatchi Immediately there was a problem. Instead of the 100 volunteers promised to the ad's designer, Martyn Walsh of Saatchi and Saatchi, fewer than 20 turned up - far too few to create the desired effect. "It was a problem," Walsh remembers. "At one point I though briefly about calling it all off. But the deadline was very tight and it was a case of 'it's now or never - we've got to do it today'." Rope trick Walsh then hit upon the idea of photographing the same group of people over and over and then striping the photos together back in his studio.

A long rope was used to mark out the shape of the queue and the volunteers, over a period of hours, had to move along it in a tight group. "Because of budget we could not use a lot of extras," Walsh remembers. "And we could not use the real unemployed. They might have objected to appearing in Tory publicity. We wanted people who would not object - which is why we used the Young Tories. But we still made them sign a form to say they wouldn't sue us if they didn't like the result." Bottom of the pile The end result, after the pictures had been superimposed on each other, gave the impression of far more than one hundred people standing in a queue. At the time, Walsh says, "there was no feeling that we were making history. In a way it was a pretty routine job - more a question of 'the election's coming, we've got to whistle something up quickly'." Walsh claims that, even after it was completed, the ad was relegated to a minor part in the election campaign and, at one point, might have been buried or even given the chop. Charles Saatchi was sceptical about the ad, Martyn claims. "It was right at the bottom of the heap.

A similar poster dramatising queues and waiting lists in the Health Service - 'Britain isn't getting better' was seen as more important - especially by the politicians," Walsh says, adding: "Some things never change". But the ad, when it was released, made an enormous impact largely, Walsh believes, because Labour's Denis Healey denounced it in Parliament. 'Like soap powder' News that people in the advert were "actors" and not genuinely unemployed had leaked and Healed said the Conservatives were dishonest, reaching a new low by "selling politics like soap-powder". But Labour politicians were not hawk-eyed enough to spot that the basic "deceit" was compounded by using the same few people over and over. Walsh had ensured that the volunteers' faces were out of focus and could not be recognised. Since then the tactic of putting up a deliberately controversial poster on a few bill-boards - and then reaping millions of pounds of free publicity as TV and newspapers report the fuss has become a standard and cost-effective tactic for advertisers. Lord Thorneycroft - big claims for poster.

When the election was delayed until the spring of 1979 the Saatchis brought out a second version of the poster with the legend "Labour still isn't working". After the election Lord Thorneycroft, Tory party treasurer at the time, claimed that the poster had "won the election for the Conservatives". When, in the 1980s, unemployment began to soar, the poster stayed in the public spotlight - this time as a prime example of both political hypocrisy and, just as importantly, the ability of advertising to sell almost anything. In 1999 "Labour Isn't Working" was voted poster of the century by a jury of ad people assembled by the advertising industry magazine Campaign. "It became the benchmark for political advertising," Walsh says. "It has influenced all political advertising since and effectiveness is measured against it." Search BBC News Online Saatchi & Saatchi: The agency that made Tory history | The Independent Media Saatchi & Saatchi: The agency that made Tory history The brothers from Baghdad were virtually unknown when their brilliant ad campaign rocketed Margaret Thatcher into power.

Ivan Fallon looks back Sunday 16 September 2007 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online The headline that the advertising (and political) world never thought it would see appeared in Campaign last week: "Labour turns to Saatchis". Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency so integrally associated with the Conservative Party, in particular the three successive electoral victories of Margaret Thatcher, had been appointed to handle the Labour party's advertising account in the next election. Thirty years ago, Saatchi & Saatchi made history with a political poster that is probably the most effective ever produced. It showed a dole queue snaking out from an employment office and disappearing into the distance. The title read: "Labour isn't working", and underneath, in smaller type, "Britain's better off with the Tories". It was to change the course of politics in Britain, end the career of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, and usher in the Thatcher era and 18 years of Tory rule. Of course, the Saatchi & Saatchi of today is not the Saatchi & Saatchi of 1978.

Then, it was a young, ambitious and trendy agency that had been founded only eight years before by two remarkable Baghdad-born brothers, Charles and Maurice Saatchi. Neither was remotely interested in politics. To them, the Conservative party was simply another account – albeit a high-profile and prestigious one – that they would run like any other. When they were appointed in March 1978, they were almost unknown outside the advertising world. Even within it, they were regarded as precocious upstarts who were never going to challenge an industry then dominated by the big Madison Avenue agencies. Six months later, with the controversy over the "Labour isn't working" ad dominating the news agenda, they were household names. Three decades after that, Maurice (by that stage Lord) Saatchi was co-chairman of the Conservative party. The Saatchi & Saatchi agency appointed by Labour no longer contains a single Saatchi. In 1994, they were forced out of the business that they had founded and in 18 years grown to become the biggest advertising business in the world.

The brothers now have their own more modest business, M&C Saatchi, which worked for the Conservatives in the last election; their old company has been consumed into the maw of a multinational. But the Saatchi political campaigns have become the stuff of legend, studied by aspiring politicians and young people hoping to make their career in the advertising industry. Before them, there was no tradition of British political parties hiring advertising agencies to run election campaigns; ads, such as they were, were designed by enthusiastic supporters for free. In the United States, however, the Johnson and Nixon campaigns had used professionals to considerable effect. Thatcher, approaching her first election, was persuaded that a bright, creative agency could make all the difference. She was right. But there are as many myths as truths about the actual role of the Saatchis. They were credited with changing her voice and her hairstyle, designing her wardrobe, guiding her every move and acting as her closest advisers and confidantes. The truth, though, is that the reclusive Charles Saatchi – at that stage the creative force behind the agency – never met her, and declined even to attend the celebratory party that she gave at 10 Downing Street when she finally got there.

To this day, they have never shaken hands. The restyling of Thatcher was largely done by Gordon Reece, her director of communications – and by herself. And, as the years rolled on and election was followed by election, there were many hands in the campaigns, which by 1987 had become bloody, savage wars between opposing sects fighting for Thatcher's ear. Yet, there are some truths, too. For instance, before she became prime minister in 1979, Thatcher had never properly defined "Thatcherism". The buzzwords were freedom, choice, opportunity, and prosperity, and there were catchphrases such as "roll back the frontiers of government". But no one had clearly set it all out in the form of a simply understood document. The Saatchi brothers, from their earliest days in the business, reduced new accounts to a simple, logical flow, using the simplest of words and as few of them as possible. Six months before the first election, the cerebral Maurice, politically naive and agnostic when it came to political parties, tried to put down on a single sheet of paper the philosophy he was required to project.

Diffidently, he proffered the finished product to the party chairman, Lord Thorneycroft, expecting it to be shredded. Instead, Thorneycroft handed it back to him with the remark: "Well, if you can convince people of that, that's it." It was, as another Tory grandee later remarked, "a very good exposition of what became known as Thatcherism". That exposition became the basis on which the next three campaigns were fought. Some of the early ads that the Saatchis produced were brilliant – and some later ones were dire. Their first effort, four months before the dole queue one, was Saatchi at its creative best. Under the slogan "Britain is going backwards", it had shots of people walking backwards over Waterloo Bridge, Stephenson's rocket steaming backwards, the Comet, the world's first jetliner, landing in reverse, climbers inching their way down Mount Everest and the voiceover of Michael Heseltine: "Backwards or forwards, we can't go on as we are".

The five party political broadcasts that ran in the 1979 campaign a year later lacked the spark of the earlier efforts, but they were still better than what went before, and Thatcher ran to an easy victory in the May 3 election. By the 1983 election, the Saatchis were rich and famous, their focus on the world-wide empire they were aggressively creating. They had made the "World's Favourite Airline" campaign for British Airways, including the iconic Spielberg-esque ad showing the island of Manhattan, its 1.2m population aboard as passengers, making its final approach to Heathrow Airport, with the slogan: "Every year, British Airways flies more people across the Atlantic than the entire population of Manhattan". The campaign was to win many awards, adding to the hundreds the agency had already chalked up. But their whole output was, at best, patchy. By the 1987 election they were richer still, and there were younger and hungrier agencies fighting for their slice of the Tory cake.

The Saatchis made some great poster ads – one showed a soldier holding up his hands, with the slogan: "Labour's policy on arms" – but they were never able to live up to the expectations created by that first campaign. This was at least partly due to the fact that in 1983 they were defending a Government that had been in power for four years, and in 1987 in power for eight. In 1979, everything had been new; Thatcher was the Opposition leader, and the worst that could happen was that she stayed it. Labour was also quick to learn. By the Blair years, under Peter Mandelson, the party's campaigns were comfortably out-Saatchiing the Saatchis. Today, Charles continues to build what is arguably the most important collection of modern art in private hands, while Maurice is out of sympathy with the modern Tory party, in which he plays no part. Political party accounts no longer have the cachet that they did in 1978, and campaigns are run more by committee than by creative copywriters with damp towels around their heads.

The Labour party has much to curse the name Saatchi & Saatchi for – and Mrs Thatcher to thank it for. But the big winners have been the Saatchi brothers themselves, who were catapulted to the big time in that exciting political era nearly 30 years ago. Ivan Fallon, chief executive of Independent News & Media UK, is author of The Brothers: The Rise & Rise of Saatchi & Saatchi That infamous ad The famous "Labour isn't working" ad was not written by Charles Saatchi, as is often believed. It was the work of a young copywriter named Andrew Rutherford, later the "R" in the agency WCRS. Charles rejected the ad, but Rutherford secretly re-inserted it into the presentation to Margaret Thatcher, then leader of the Opposition. Thatcher was never easy to present to, and when she was shown the "Labour isn't working" poster, she stopped them. She gazed at it for some time, then exclaimed "wonderful". The poster ran in August 1978, a critical time for the Government of Jim Callaghan, who was deciding whether to call an election for October. The ad created an immediate sensation.

In the middle of the silly season, the media seized on it as the topic of the day. Government ministers hit the roof. Then, just as the controversy was dying down, the chancellor, Denis Healy, re-ignited it with the accusation – one Saatchi denied – that the dole queue was actually a line of Saatchi employees. By September, the Tories were ahead in the polls, and Callaghan decided to delay the election. It was one of the biggest misjudgements in British political history: the "winter of discontent" of 1979 saw the biggest industrial disruption since 1926, with rubbish piling up and bodies going unburied. In March, after his famous "Crisis? What crisis?" remark, Callaghan lost a vote of confidence in the House of Commons, was forced to call an election and was thrashed by Thatcher. The rest is history.

BBC ON THIS DAY | 30 | 1978: Tories recruit advertisers to win votes About This Site | Text Only 1978: Tories recruit advertisers to win votes The Conservative Party has recruited advertisers Saatchi & Saatchi to revamp its image and get its political message across ahead of the General Election. The agency is expected to help portray the opposition leader Margaret Thatcher in a softer image and as being less strident than she is currently perceived. Saatchi & Saatchi, the largest British-owned advertising company, will also help produce Conservative Party political broadcasts. The company was recruited by Gordon Reece, the party's director of communications, who has a background in television and is expected to help mould Mrs Thatcher's appearance for broadcasting. Advertisers have been given a free hand in which to cover this, it has been reported, but details have not been revealed. Education, unemployment and taxes are all expected to be high on the Tory agenda in any fight against Labour. Industry experts said the campaign would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds for the Conservative Party. The move, given an election date has not yet been set, signals the Tories' readiness to fight a general election as Labour appears to be faltering in the polls.

Campaign criticised Politicians both within the opposition and in Prime Minister Jim Callaghan's government have criticised the Tory stance in engineering an election campaign with advertisers, describing it as 'frivolous'. But these have been shrugged-off by senior Tories as the strategy is one last used by the party successfully in the 1950s. Saatchi & Saatchi is considered to be a formidable force in advertising. Since the early 1970s the company headed by Maurice Saatchi, 30, and his brother Charles, 32, has risen from zero position on the advertising agency league table to become third largest in Britain. The company's client list includes giants such as Procter & Gamble, British Leyland and Rowntree Mackintosh and Schweppes. Saatchi & Saatchi made a particular breakthrough with the Health Education Council's account. The Jeremy King-devised Pregnant Man poster captured the public's imagination. Attack is the best form of defence: the golden rules of political campaigning | Politics | The Guardian Politics Attack is the best form of defence: the golden rules of political campaigning Come election time, the rival parties’ advertising strategies plumb new depths of dirty trickery.

We trawl the archives for the most vicious, most effective campaigns The Saatchis' infamous Labour Isn't Working poster. Photograph: The Conservative Party Archive/Getty Images Wednesday 11 February 2015 14.01 EST Last modified on Thursday 11 August 2016 06.42 EDT Share on Messenger Close ‘There are only ever two ad strategies in an election,” says Lord Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite adman. “It’s either the opposition saying, ‘Time for a change’, or the government saying, ‘Britain’s great again, don’t let the other lot muck it up.’ The rest is just details.” And he’s ostensibly right. But while the strategies stay the same, the executions can vary wildly. When the Saatchis released their infamous Labour Isn’t Working poster in 1978, an incredulous Denis Healey publically accused the Tories of selling themselves like soap powder . An excited press reported on the spat, helpfully republishing images of the poster. The Saatchis had just taught Healey a golden rule of political advertising: always try to provoke the opposition into a reaction. Here are some of the others. On the warpath ...

Tories attack in 1987. Photograph: The Conservative Party Archive/Getty Images Hit first, hit hard and keep on hitting Jeremy Sinclair was the Saatchi & Saatchi creative director behind the defining political ads of the Thatcher era. He cut his teeth taking on a floundering Labour government in the late 70s. “The unions were taking over and [James] Callaghan was weak. There was much to exploit,” he says. “We weren’t scared to be negative, we relished it. Our approach became ‘hit first, hit hard and keep on hitting’.” It was an attack plan that saw them mastermind three successive victories for Thatcher’s party. After Labour Isn’t Working was used for the 1979 election, they shot down Michael Foot in 1983 with a poster comparing the striking similarities between their election manifesto and that of the Soviet Union’s Communist party, under the headline: “Like your manifesto, comrade”. In 1987, Neil Kinnock stumbled in a TV interview, suggesting that a Labour government would resist a Soviet invasion with guerrilla warfare.

Saatchis created a poster that featured a British soldier holding his arms aloft in surrender, under the headline: “Labour’s Policy On Arms”. The Tories’ 1992 Tax Bombshell poster. Photograph: Conservative Party Archive/Getty Images Play to your strengths John Major’s Conservatives went into the 1992 election presiding over the worst recession in decades, reeling from the bloody dismissal of Thatcher and trailing Labour in the polls. They sent for Dick Worthing, Ronald Reagan’s chief pollster, who told them they must identify their strongest single issue and never stop talking about it. “He told me, ‘Look, when it comes to the NHS, the Tories are perceived as dreadful. So you just shut up. Don’t talk about it,’” says Shaun Woodward, then Tory campaign chief . “I said: ‘But hang on, what if Labour say we’re going to privatise it?’ And he said: ‘Don’t be provoked. Don’t say anything. Let me take this to an extreme. I’m not advocating this but, for right-of-centre parties, defence is normally perceived as a strong issue. Of course, what you should do is start a war.

Because you’d make defence high salience with the public.’” Woodward deemed this a little drastic. But the team at Saatchi & Saatchi identified taxation as the issue they were strongest on and resolved to spend the entire campaign hammering home their message on the subject. Soon, the streets of Britain were plastered with images of “Labour’s Tax Bombshell”, a Tory poster claiming that the average voter would pay £1,250 more a year under Labour. Jeremy Sinclair later admitted that they had costed Labour’s shadow budget as containing £35bn of public spending and “basically divided it by the number of taxpayers in Britain”. When the polls are tight, fight dirty Pinterest ‘You can’t go around insulting politicians!’ ... Margaret Thatcher vetoed a personal attack on Labour leader Michael Foot in 1983. Photograph: PA Archive Leaders don’t like negative campaigning. They like to think that people will vote for them out of sheer enthusiasm, not a distaste for the opposition.

In 1983, Bell presented Thatcher with a poster showing 70-year-old Labour leader Michael Foot walking across Hampstead Heath with a walking stick, under the headline: “Even pensioners are better off under the Conservatives.” The prime minister was appalled. “She almost threw me out of the room!” recalls Bell. “She said: ‘You can’t go around insulting politicians, abuse is not acceptable.’” But such was the unpopularity of Foot’s Labour party in 1983, the election result was already a foregone conclusion (“We could have a put a big sign up in Piccadilly Circus saying ‘Fuck Off’ and still won,” Bell later noted). When the opinion polls are tighter, politicians need to get dirty. In 1992, Sinclair explained to Woodward that Major had to drop his nice guy image to take on a resurgent Kinnock. “It’s very simple in this game: you either kill or get killed,” said the man from Saatchis. “If Major doesn’t win, he loses. There is no halfway house.” Woodward told him that Major was against running a negative campaign. “Is he OK with losing?” asked Sinclair. “Obviously not,” replied Woodward.

“Well then,” Sinclair said. “Kill or get killed.” William Hague gets a Thatcher makeover in Labour’s 2001 poster. Photograph: Stephen Hird/Reuters If it’s funny, it’s fine By the Blair era, it was Labour’s turn to do the provoking. In Trevor Beattie, the adman behind Wonderbra’s Hello Boys poster and French Connection’s FCUK campaign, Blair had just the man to whip up the requisite controversy. In 2001, he produced a poster featuring Tory leader William Hague wearing Thatcher’s hairstyle. The original headline read “Get Out And Vote On Thursday Or This Gets Back In”. “I took it to Downing Street and told Blair: ‘This will be the most iconic image of this election,’” says Beattie. Blair shook his head and said, ‘No, no, no.’ Then he began to chuckle. Alastair Campbell told him: “You’ve just shown why it works. Because if it’s funny, it’s fine. People look at it and smile, but it makes a really powerful negative point.” Blair gave the go-ahead but insisted that Hague wasn’t referred to as “this” in the headline.

Beattie changed the slogan to the much funnier “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” The Conservatives responded with anger and the fallout continued for days, with the so-called “wiggy” image appearing widely across the national press. Blair had learned his lesson about the power of negativity infused with humour. “I used to tell him: ‘Don’t think by being more positive you’ll stop them from trying to kill you,’” says Campbell. Attack is the best form of defence Pinterest The Conservatives’ demonic Blair poster from 1997. Photograph: The Conservative Party Archive/Getty Images In 1997, Saatchis produced a poster of Blair’s beaming face adorned with a set of demon eyes (“New Labour, New Danger”). Such was the impact of the poster, Labour’s senior campaign team called an emergency meeting. “I was on holiday and had to join a conference call,” remembers Campbell. “I think it was Peter [Mandelson] who said: ‘We need to get hold of a bishop to speak out about this!’ And a few hours later we had the bishop Of Oxford condemning the poster on the national news.

The whole thing backfired on the Tories.” Sinclair, the creator of the demon eyes poster, later admitted: “It was one of the most famous and ineffective things we ever produced.” You can’t buy votes In 1997, with the Conservatives trailing New Labour by 20 points in the opinion polls, Maurice Saatchi was said to have assured Major that the party could spend their way to victory. But after a campaign in which the main parties spent a collective £27m on advertising (in 1992, they had spent just £6.5m) the polls remained unchanged and Labour won by a landslide. Perhaps Saatchi should have remembered the lessons of 1983, when Tory chairman Cecil Parkinson had been so confident of victory that he had cancelled all ad spending in the final week of the campaign. Bell had proposed that the party take out three consecutive pages in every national newspaper. The ad space alone would have cost £1.5m (with roughly £250,000 going to Saatchi & Saatchi in commission fees). But Parkinson saw it as a wasteful extravagance, used to crush an opponent that was already on its knees.

Bell was furious, turning up at a press conference to try to persuade Thatcher to overrule Parkinson’s decision. But Parkinson pulled Bell aside and told him: “Look Tim – you are not Michelangelo and these ads are not the Sistine Chapel!” On polling day, the Conservatives won by a comfortable 147-seat majority and Parkinson was vindicated. “It would have cost us millions and looked to the public as if we were trying to buy their votes,” he says. The perfectly normal John Major, in John Schlesinger’s 1992 film Project normality “When Tony Blair first came along I think his greatest strength was that he appeared to be normal,” says Sinclair. “He came across as a regular bloke you could have a drink with.” Forget a grasp of policy detail, statesmanlike gravitas or intellectual rigour – a would-be prime minister really needs to look as if he or she could fit in down the local. Years before Nigel Farage, Thatcher grasped this when her spin-doctor-in-chief, the flamboyant TV producer Gordon Reece, persuaded her to be filmed doing the dishes in her London flat.

Later, Midnight Cowboy director John Schlesinger was hired to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary featuring Major touring his hometown of Brixton , chatting to locals and reminiscing about his humble upbringing. Overnight, the characteristics that had previously seen Spitting Image label him as dull made him seem authentic, approachable and honest. Labour’s ad-team used the same trick in 1997, when award-winning documentary maker Molly Dineen filmed Blair playing football in the park and cooking dinner at home with his family. “It made people who didn’t want to vote Tory again, but still weren’t completely sure about Labour, feel really good about Tony Blair,” says Labour adman Chris Powell. Pass the blink test In 1997, a buoyant Labour campaign team needed an idea that would help them over the finishing line. Powell convinced them that the way to go was to remind the public of broken Tory promises. “John Major had increased taxes since the last election, which is the cardinal sin for a Tory prime minister,” he says. Labour plastered the streets with gigantic posters emblazoned with the no-nonsense headline: “22 Tax Rises Since 1992”.

A few weeks later they stormed to their greatest ever electoral victory. Politics can be complicated and boring, but a great ad can make it seem simple and engaging. In order to do so, it needs to be understood in the blink of an eye. “Posters will always be important because if you can’t sum it up in five or six words then chances are your message isn’t right,” says Sinclair. In early January this year, Labour issued a poster featuring David Cameron’s face next to a headline that read: “The Tories want to cut spending on public services back to the levels of the 1930s, when there was no NHS.” There are 21 words in that. The full Elvis ... David Cameron gets a spray-paint quiff in 2010. Photograph: Steve Chatterley / newsteam.co.uk Take on the bloggers at their own game In 2010, the Conservatives unveiled an image of Cameron, with a seemingly airbrushed complexion, proclaiming: “We can’t go on like this.

I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.” Within days, newspapers were running photos of a poster-site in Hereford, where an imaginative vandal had spray-painted an Elvis-style quiff on to Cameron’s head and adapted the headline to read: “We can’t go on like this, with suspicious minds.” A blog called mydavidcameron.com was set up to allow people to create their own versions of the posters. Standout headlines included: “Some of my best friends are poor” and “Vote Tory or I’ll kill this kitten”. The site received more then 250,000 views during the campaign. The agency behind the original poster, Euro RSCG, was replaced by the ever-reliable M&C Saatchi shortly afterwards. But increasingly, political ad agencies are refusing to sit back and allow bedroom bloggers to rip their campaigns to shreds. They are creating their own near-the-knuckle content for social media, effectively running a two-tier campaign.

When Labour ran a poster in 2010 featuring Cameron’s head Photoshopped on to the body of Ashes to Ashes antihero Gene Hunt under the headline “Don’t let him take Britain back to the 1980s”, they might have thought they had landed a decent blow. But before the bloggers could create any spoofs, the official Tory ad team had conjured their own, responding with the swaggering riposte: “Fire up the Quattro, it’s time for a change”. There are the official ads and the ones released anonymously online and presumed to be the work of Photoshop whizzes with a bit of time on their hands. When Pulp’s Common People was reimagined as an animated David Cameron movie, people assumed it was the work of students. It later transpired that a Labour agency had made and distributed it without official party consent. Make it personal “People say, ‘I don’t know what David Cameron stands for’, but I don’t know if that is a bad thing or a good thing,” says Bill Muirhead, executive director of M&C Saatchi. “Instead I find myself thinking, OK, what are the weapons you’d use against Ed Miliband in an election campaign?

Well, he stabbed his brother in the back. And, you know, anyone who does that to his brother, I mean, bloody hell. Imagine what he’d do to the country.” Expect Tory attacks on the Labour leader to become bolder and bloodier over the next few months. Perhaps Ed ought to call a bishop. • Sam Delaney’s Mad Men And Bad Men – What Happened When British Politics Met Advertising is published by Faber at £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846 Will advertising swing the 2015 election? – Channel 4 News Share on Twitter There was a time when political advertising comprised two simple messages. “Britain is OK, don’t let the others ruin it,” the party of government would scream. “Time for a change,” claimed the opposition. With their messages emblazoned on billboards up and down the country, this formula paved the way for some of Britain’s most memorable political advertising.

The 1978 “Labour isn’t working” poster, created by Saatchi & Saatchi (above), compounded a prevailing insecurity about job prospects. It is widely seen as instrumental in bringing down James Callaghan’s government and catapulting Margaret Thatcher into power a year later. From that moment, advertising stamped its mark on British politics and was used time and again to devastating effect. In 1992 a Tory poster putting a £1,250 figure to “Labour’s tax bombshell” tapped into a prevailing fear of change in a climate where voters already felt financially stretched. John Major defied all opinion polls and remained in power. While advertising alone may not have single-handedly swung elections, it certainly helped cement prevailing ideas and often gave a political campaign a clear message and momentum. Picture: The Conservatives launched their first poster of the 2015 election last September, playing on the infamous ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster of 1978. Advertising today But are we likely to see that happen again in 2015? Perhaps not in the traditional sense. Advertising’s role has changed since the days of concepts that were designed inside some of London’s most glittering agencies.

Gone too are the old-world binary battles between a party of government and its principle opponent. Just look at the current electoral landscape. With polls suggesting a tight race between Labour and the Conservatives, the political anomaly of Ukip, and the real prospect of another hung parliament, the traditional ads that framed the elections of the 70s, 80s and 90s are consigned to history. In its place is work that is more nuanced and experimental. Labour’s recent “Un-credible Shrinking Man” ad portrayed Nick Clegg as a subservient puppet of the coalition government. Its objective was clear: reinforce why Lib Dems should feel utterly disillusioned when casting their vote in 2015 and win back traditional Labour voters that may have defected in the last election. There were differing opinions on its level of success. You can judge for yourself here: Almost immediately the Lib Dems hit back with an ad portraying Ed Miliband as silent on the threat from Ukip. In the old days, advertising agencies would be hampered by longer lead-times; now thanks to technology, those windows have narrowed from days into minutes. It is just one part of the onslaught of digital media, which has changed the scope and consumption of advertising.

The onslaught of digital media While digital advertising has been around for decades, many cite the Obama influence, which widely changed the way we think about political advertising and its capabilities . Its power first became clear in 2008, after a shrewd campaign that used digital technology to engage swathes of the young and disenfranchised across America while rebutting Republican smears and raising millions in donations. In 2012, the Obama administration sharpened its credentials even further , using big data and algorithms to re-engage supporters. Britain may not be this advanced yet, but it is certainly inching closer. In 2010 the British race was watched intently via social media. Expect to see more in the next 10 months, especially with campaign wizards like David Axelrod , Lynton Crosby and Jim Messina flown in to help harness each party’s digital potential. It is, however, a medium fraught with risks. “Strong ideas will spread like wildfire but weak ones will be parodied and pilloried, without the parties being able to do much about it,” Andy Nairn, a partner of Lucky Generals, which produced Labour’s advertising, told Channel 4 News.

“Mistakes will be made and politicians will have to accept that they will not be able to control everything – because abstaining will only make things worse.” There is no shortage of examples. Grant Shapps’ post-budget bingo ad, released moments after the announcement of the March budget , lacked the rigorous strategic testing and found itself pilloried on social media reinforcing perceptions of the Conservatives as the out-of-touch party of privilege. Cutting through? Yet for all the drama it generates online, does digital actually effect votes? Not greatly, recent evidence suggests, with the voting base among young people still desperately low (44 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds turned out to vote in 2010). Yet it can help drive engagement, while digital media has less regulatory red-tape than television, leading to more creative and engaging work than the traditionally tedious party political broadcast of old. Lord Bell, credited with leading the advertising strategy that led to three elections for Margaret Thatcher, insists advertising still plays a role in politics, not quite in the way of old. “Rather than a mainstream event, it’ll now be like the background noise,” he told Channel 4 News.

“Ultimately the direction of the election will be decided the leadership debates, the publication of the manifestos and the personalities of the leaders.” Robert Senior, EMEA chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, agrees. “Our politics are becoming increasingly presidential, placing even greater emphasis on the cult of personality,” he told Channel 4 News. “Gratuitous cheap gags, like the recent Shrinking and Silent Man, are more a peripheral valve for inexperienced politicians to vent their spleen. Hopefully the election will serve up more wit, substance and dignity.”

Question: In 1978, who created the poster 'Labour isn't working'?
Answer: SAATCHI & SAATCHI